Advanced Skills: From "It Worked Once" to Reliable
For the skill you built, got disappointed by, and never used again. Why skills fail, how to fix them, and how to prove one helps before sharing it.
- Audience
- Developers and tech leads who use agents daily and have written skills. Also works as a champions kickoff before an internal hackathon.
- Duration
- 3 to 3.5 hours, hands-on throughout
- Group size
- 15 to 20 participants, on their own laptops with the tools they already use
- Hands-on
- On the team's real tasks, or on prepared exercises I bring
- Includes
- A tailoring call with the group lead beforehand and a follow-up session about 30 days later
- Where
- On-site in Israel, on-site abroad (I fly in for a few days and can run several sessions or teams back to back), or remote
What we cover
- Why skills disappoint: weak triggers, bloat, overlap, no way to check their own work.
- Anatomy of a reliable skill, and what belongs in AGENTS.md, a skill, a sub-agent, a hook or MCP.
- Building and benchmarking skills with skill-creator tools: trigger tests, runs with and without the skill, checking the output instead of the agent's own report.
- Reliability beyond skills, and a quality bar before a skill goes into the team's shared skills repo.
What participants do
- 1 Bring a skill that let them down, diagnose it and rebuild it with a skill-creator tool.
- 2 Write an eval set for it and run it against a no-skill baseline.
What they take home
- One of their own skills, rebuilt, with an eval set that runs in their repo.
- A quality checklist for any skill before it's shared.
- A repo with the workshop's exercises and materials.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you tailor it to our team?
Yes. Before the session I have a tailoring call with the group lead. The hands-on part then runs on the team's real tasks, or on prepared exercises I bring.
Does it matter what language or stack we use?
No. The agent reads and writes the code, whatever the language. Participants work on their own laptops with the tools they already use. Exercises run on the team's real tasks, or on prepared exercises I bring.
Can you run it on-site abroad?
Yes. I fly in for a few days and can run several sessions or teams back to back. It also runs on-site in Israel or remote.
What happens after the workshop?
About 30 days later I run a follow-up session with the group. Participants also keep a repo with the workshop's exercises and materials.
Related workshops
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Same model, different harness, very different results. Participants build a harness tuned to their role and measure what it saves on a real task.
See the Harness Engineering workshopAgents in Production: Reliability at Scale
An agent that works on your laptop is not an agent that runs hundreds of thousands of times. Participants take one agent from prototype to something they can run at scale, measure and trust.
See the Agents in Production workshopGet in touch
Tell me about your team and what you want them to walk away with.